I suffer from chronic insomnia, and let me just say this: Thank you. Thank you for understanding. So few people seem to understand how absolutely fucking shitty it is to go without sleep regularly. And you're right by the way.....

An all-nighter is difficult but manageable. Two days is bad. Around the second day you start to feel giddy, and your stomach will churn. You begin to experience the onset of paranoia, you start feeling depressed for no particular reason. You become more trusting in bullshit, and you're less critical and more willing to believe in stuff that you would otherwise think outrageous.

On day 3 you begin to question your own sanity. You wonder if you will ever get sleep again. You start to fear the covers, the ceiling looms over you whenever you enter the bedroom. The black spots that you saw in your peripheral vision on day two start to look more like spiders. You see patterns you never did before in your past. It is from day three and onward that you begin to go insane.

Day four is when you begin experiencing microsleep periods, and losing memory and all sense of time. You will find yourself standing in front of the fridge looking inside it, and not know when you opened it, or even when you last ate. You will still remember to eat, but you will wonder why you bother.

On day five and onwards I can't tell you - because that's when I've lost all concepts of time in the past. You're a zombie. You won't know if you're even awake or dreaming. You find pieces of paper scribbled with your own nonsensical handwriting, like: "Remember the connection", and "The Buddha is in the corner, you MUST remember you MUST remember you MUST remember" covered allover your apartment.

You find your own voice, that voice of rationality and critical thinking slowly receding. As you go without sleep you will believe you're jesus one minute, and feel an elated sense of joy - and the next you'll be wrenching wishing you'd die. You'll still know that lack of sleep is the issue (Unless you've fallen into the trap of believing that sleep is designed by those in power, to keep your thoughts restrained... That happened to me once). Once I theorized that maybe my brain had started to emulate a whale's, and I convinced myself that I could feel one hemisphere of my brain sleep while the other was awake.